Half-days, Sticky Notes, and Touching: A Public School Update

Warning: I may sound a bit snide, sarcastic, or cynical in this post. If that's not a departure from the norm, please don't tell me. :)

HALF-DAYS:  Perfect timing. A satisfaction survey from the public school system arrived today in the mail. It just so happens that today was a half-day. Why? Because of some parent-teacher conferences. Which is fine. Except... why today? This is the way it is done every year. We have a day off on Martin Luther King Day (which is fine by me), then they go to a full school day on Tuesday, and then we have this half day on Wednesday. Always in the same week as the Monday off. Hmmmm. Wouldn't it be great if we could have that half-day on the Friday before the Monday off? (I know what some of you will say--"But then the people who really need those mid-year conferences might not come because they could take that long weekend and go somewhere." Poppycock. Nobody's going anywhere. They just got back from Christmas Break.)

But I've gotten off track here. The real kicker about the half days is this: The schools are so crammed that my 2nd grader has lunch at 10:30 every day. But on the HALF days, he has lunch at 9:30. 9:30!! Seriously. They're being dismissed at 12noon--why are we feeding them lunch? So this morning he had breakfast, got his backpack together, got on the bus, went to school, and then...they read a book, followed by lunch. Crazy.

STICKY NOTES:  Does your child's school do this also? It's not so much an annoyance as a curiosity. Every once in a while, when there is some event (usually of the fund-raising type) coming up, Daniel comes home wearing a sticky note. Today's was a reminder of a fund-raising night at Chick-Fil-A. It just strikes me as funny that he is sometimes tranformed into this human bulletin board.

TOUCHING:  Although I opted my child out of all the "Family Life" objectives for this year (you know, that's when the school makes a somewhat pathetic attempt at doing the family's job of teaching proper behavior and morals to our children), so...although, I signed him out of these, they failed to take him out and he recently was taught about "good touches and bad touches." You may be thinking--harmless enough--but I disagree. When I asked him to sum up what he had learned, he told me that if a touch feels good, then it's a good touch, and if it feels bad it's a bad touch.

WHAT?!?

This is WHY I opted him out of these so that we could cover these topics at home. I'm glad I asked for a summary or I might not have known how he interpreted the information he received.

So I filled out that little pink survey and it is ready to be mailed tomorrow. I have to wonder, though, if my completed surveys end up in some discard pile because I sound like I'm frustrated enough to reach out and "touch" someone.